Moving on . . .

The Agency Problem

In 2009, one of Google’s self-driving cars came to an intersection with a four-way stop. It came to a halt and waited for other cars to do the same before proceeding through the intersection. Apparently, that is the rule it was taught—but, of course, that is not what people do. So the robot car got completely paralyzed, blocked the intersection, and had to be towed away. Tellingly, the Google engineer in charge said that what he had learned from this episode was that human beings need to be “less idiotic.”

Think about that. If there is an ambiguous case of right-of-way, human drivers will often make eye contact. Maybe one waves the other through or indicates by the movements of the car itself a readiness to yield, and maybe not. It is not a stretch to say that there is a kind of body language of driving and a range of driving dispositions. We are endowed with social intelligence, through the exercise of which people work things out among themselves and usually manage to cooperate well enough. Tocqueville thought it was in small-bore practical activities demanding improvisation and cooperation that the habits of collective self-government were formed, and this is significant. There is something that can aptly be called the democratic personality, and it is cultivated not in civics class, but in the granular features of everyday life. But the social intelligence on display at that intersection was completely invisible to the Google guy. This too is significant. The premise behind the push for driverless cars is that human beings are terrible drivers. This is one instance of a wider pattern. There is a tacit picture of the human being that guides our institutions and provides a shared intellectual DNA for the governing classes. It has various elements, but the common thread is a low regard for human beings.

One has to think the obtuseness of the Google guy is due in part to the fact that tech people usually lack a humanistic education. Maybe he was a little bit “on the spectrum” as well and therefore had a hard time perceiving social phenomena, such as the way an intersection actually works. But he needn’t have been. He need only have been steeped in the prevailing account of how the human mind works, which is called the computational theory of mind. The origins of this lie with cybernetics in the years immediately after World War II.¹⁹

^{For an excellent account of this, see Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).}

Mentation as computation continues to provide the intellectual foundation for the mainstream of cognitive science despite coming in for devastating critique from the more phenomenologically oriented dissidents within that discipline—such as Hubert Dreyfus, Andy Clark, and Alva Noë—who emphasize the embodied nature of human intelligence and the fact that it is socially bootstrapped. That is, our apprehension of the world is not something that takes place entirely within our heads like a brain in a vat.

Unfortunately, this is not the case according to modern neuroscience, it’s the very reason Solipsism exists as a philosophical idea. Furthermore, I would argue that this entire portion exposes an inherent self-contradiction in Crawford’s otherwise valid argument. Crawford heavily insinuates that Google is some all-powerful and unrestrained monolith throughout his essay, but the examples he gives shows the contradictions to that argument and seems to unintentionally emphasize the strength of both the free-market of ideas and economics. Instead of convincing me that the government needs to intervene to protect democratic norms and values, because of all-powerful technocrats hijacking social power; he has instead given me reason to doubt that Google and other competing social media companies will hold power and sway for long due to how free market economics operates based upon self-interest. The example of the “Google guy” doesn’t express to me some cold, pitiless monolith of technocrats who will reshape the world with their ideas; they instead give me the impression of a bunch of incompetent humans who are failing to translate their grand ideas into realistic, useful, and feasible ends for human capitalist consumption.

The anti-social media arguments are a very intelligent and profound critique of the problems caused by social media companies, but I think he’s allowing his fear and an erroneous belief in their supposed all-powerful nature to give an unrealistic view of their influential power. It seems more like fear-mongering to me, but in fairness, these companies are to blame for how cold and impersonal they treat their consumer base. My reasons for why I didn’t find his argument convincing are thus:

1. People can turn off social media. In fact, Facebook apparently lost over half a million subscribers since 2022. Some may argue it’s nothing to billionaire CEOs like Zuckerberg; it probably freaks out CEOs more than people realize, because it means that they may have reached the zenith of growth for their company and that there is no going upward any further.
2. People have alternatives to Google, which isn’t talked about at all due to Crawford’s fear-mongering. Yet again, Free-market economics 101 to the rescue. People can use alternative and more privatized search engines like Duckduckgo, Brave Search, and many others. Moreover, people can purchase and use VPNs to protect their privacy now and systems like Google Chrome that people suspect don’t allow for privacy are being tossed aside by tech-savvy Millennials and Gen Xers for Brave, Opera GX, and other web browsers that have built-in VPN support due to consumer demand for privacy. You just need to take the time to do your own research.
3. Crawford ignores or doesn’t really seem think about human curiosity. If inept arguments about subject matter are made, such as all the complaints about this very playbook by the Heritage Foundation – which I saw numerous times on facebook, the very website that you complain about – then, while some may hold uncritical contempt based upon criticisms given by others, there are people like me who see this playbook being compared to actual fascist governments and stop taking any such comparisons to fascism seriously because it seems extreme. After people like myself recognize this, we decide to take the time to research information ourselves to understand your actual views and not the nonsense peddled by others as I did just before writing this response to it. I don’t agree with you and I believe your arguments are misconstruing billionaire technocrats as Gods out of fear, but I don’t take the criticisms comparing your ideas to fascistic governments seriously either.As another anecdote, I did not start self-identifying as a feminist until after listening to TJ Kirk, the Amazing Atheist, rant about how “feminazis” are ruining the US in my very early college years. He kept making increasingly more idiotic videos whining about Tumblr feminists to the extent that I stopped taking the videos as comedy and I began to view it more as just him making deranged rants; I proceeded to just look-up standard feminist arguments and reasons why feminists believe what they do in a dispassionate and detached manner. I found myself agreeing with the list of arguments and became a feminist thanks to TJ Kirk’s whiny videos.
4. Why not just protest that the government should break-up these social media companies into separate companies, if they have such monopolistic control as Crawford argues? Yet again, the solution would be free market economics 101 with the government only interfering to enforce free market economic value systems on these companies instead of allowing them to remain as monopolies, as is heavily insinuated by Crawford’s article.Going even further, why not protest that the government should increase their corporate taxes so they’re less focused on acting like Gods who treat regular folks as lesser mortals, and get slapped with a reality check from our democratic institutions? Crawford surprisingly quotes Marx and argues social media companies have become like priestly superstructures similar to Marx’s critique of capitalist institutions; well, why not argue for higher taxes to be paid by those unfettered, all-powerful social media companies? Crawford wants to argue there’s a massive disparity with how much power and information these companies have and how many billions of dollars they have, but doesn’t even think of arguing about the simple solution of having them pay higher taxes to pay their fair share for the public good that he claims to want to protect? Would that, perhaps, be too progressive of a solution for his liking?
5. There is no nice way of saying this: certain parts of this article were extremely juvenile and ignorant of the racism that permeates social media. I cannot believe an institution like the Heritage foundation didn’t think to double-check the portion about Edison or ask Crawford to rethink that portion about inventors of different ethnicities. The reason Google, Facebook, and so on are promoting Black inventors is because there is a deluge of racist memes depicting Black people as backwards without White civilization and there still are White Western intellectuals (Sam Harris and Charles Murray) giving a pseudo-intellectual cover for this kind of racist hate. A lot of this search engine change to give people a better understanding of the contributions of Black people isn’t even targeted at Americans, but foreign countries where racist views are more permissive in the cultural osmosis. I don’t even know how to explain the sheer multitude of anti-Black racist memes that I use to see on Discord by Brazilian discord users prior to Discord’s policy changes. It’s important to keep in mind that some of these policies are due to global factors, not just factors in the US and narrowing the issue to solely US political interests would reduce the competitive advantage of US companies in the global market. It would reduce our global influence and potentially the foreign policy interests of the US via soft power methods. If, for example, a racist Brazilian who posts anti-Black memes is repeatedly shown example after example of Black inventors in the US like Alice H. Parker, then they might be forced to challenge their views. Reducing our global advantage, just because facts make Crawford and those with similar views uncomfortable, is honestly pathetic and weak in my view. Furthermore, he brought up the example of Thomas Edison as an example of an ignored White inventor. Who was this trying to convince? Did Crawford or the Heritage Foundation ever bother talking to a Millennial or Gen Zer before making that argument? No one likes Thomas Edison anymore; because he’s a reminder to Millennials and Gen Zers of egotistical business men like Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Trump, Bob Iger, selfish Wall Street executives after the 2008 financial collapse, and many others. He has become the CEO boogeyman to represent everything wrong with US business culture. Why? Because he’s been memed to death as someone who stole credit from working class White men like Nikolai Tesla and Louis Le Prince. It just shows the complete ignorance of Crawford and the Heritage Foundation that they honestly thought Edison was getting less search results because he’s White and not because Millennials absolutely hate any mention of him due to his historic mistreatment of Nikolai Tesla and the mysterious disappearance of Louis Le Prince. Now, I am not arguing on the veracity of those claims against Edison, but I am arguing that this shows a level of ignorance that reveals more the author’s insecurities than it does to make any compelling arguments. The contempt for Edison has been going on for over a decade in rap videos, reddit forums, and so much more. Edison is viewed as old, obnoxious blowhard of a CEO and Nikolai Tesla is viewed as a mad genius held back by a society too ignorant for his greatness. Who do you think Millennials and Gen Zers are going to identify with and view as “cool” when comparing the two? Crawford was so ignorant of this fact that he actually believed Edison wasn’t being searched as popularly because Edison is White? He seriously never heard of the controversies? The sheer stupidity of that portion is quite awe-striking to read in its boomer levels of ignorance. How are you genuinely so pathetic of a person that you viewed Edison’s lack of search results as something to be insecure about regarding your ethnic background? I had to stop myself from laughing at the sheer idiocy, but thank you for the entertainment:

This past winter, Google’s Gemini AI image generator was in the news for generating images only of non-white people in response to prompts such as “American Founders” or “Great Scientists.” Was this a glitch? Or did it pull back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz? Given how central “anti-racism” is to the Democratic Party’s platform (in his inaugural address, Joe Biden announced that it would be the organizing principle of all federal programs), one could be forgiven for suspecting that the wildly counterfactual results returned by Google’s software indicate that reality is not the standard to which AI will be held.

The embarrassing Gemini results have been widely interpreted as an unanticipated artifact of the underlying machine learning, a hiccup of the sort to be expected as an immature technology finds its legs. “We need to do better” was Google’s PR response. But years before the advent of AI image generators, Google was returning image search results (for actual human beings) that had the same wild bias. In response to a search for “famous American inventors,” for example, one could find somewhere far down in the results a picture of Thomas Edison, but for the most part, the images were of black people and women about whom most people have never heard. It would be hard to imagine an algorithmic thumb on the scale better calibrated to stoke right-wing fears about a “genocide by substitution” or to evoke the perennial need of totalitarian regimes to rewrite history.

You are genuinely pathetic and your own words prove it. I’m laughing at you, not with you. You failed to do your research here. I can’t imagine how stupid someone genuinely has to be to want to negatively impact free market capitalism by injecting government intervention because they feel insecure about search results on Google. How can someone genuinely be this pathetic of a human being while being so articulate and intelligent? Use a different search engine, you whiny and pathetic excuse for an adult.

6. There are more important social issues to be concerned about than this pathetic drivel of a complaint in favor of government intervention because a scant few insecure White males don’t like Google search results and are genuinely too stupid to understand they can use other search engines with better privacy features:

• The Supreme Court case of Oliphant vs Suquamish 1978 still allows registered sex offenders to enter Native American reservations to rape and kill Indigenous people with impunity. The US public remains indifferent even as Indigenous people serve in the US armed forces at five times the rate as other ethnic backgrounds on a per capita basis. We literally live in a country where sex offenders are raping and killing the family members of our service members because of a US Supreme Court decision that was never changed since 1978. Gen Xers keep complaining about how social media needs more national attention, while this is a fact of life for Indigenous Americans throughout the US…
• Climate Change
• Citizens United vs FEC has led to the gradual collapse of the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court itself in the eyes of the US public.
• The Growing threats of China and Russian collusion against US foreign policy and economic interests.
• Adjusting the renewable resources while maintaining US hegemony in a world where the petrodollar system and the US as world reserve currency will be diminished.
• The US National Debt.
• Gun Violence.
• Governors enforcing religious strictures in blatant violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution; punishing Gen Zers and onwards by violating their constitutional rights; for the crimes of their own generation of Gen X.

To be frank, at this point, if any Gen Xer is going to start whining about social media, then they need to be absolutely made clear how much of a genuine moron they actually are and how much of a waste of fucking time, attention, and effort it is to deal with their stupidity. Any time I read a word of their bile about government intervening in social media with no awareness of how it negatively impacts core Constitutional tenants like Free Speech, I feel like we Millennials and Gen Zers are honestly superior to them; and if you think for a moment that we aren’t your intellectual superiors, then why the fuck do you keep making the most stupid arguments and wasting away time, attention, and resources on your pathetic, worthless fucking insecurities while we Millennials and Gen Zers will always have to pick-up after you worthless fucking dumbasses continue to destroy our country and ruined the US with your disgusting stupidity? How the fuck can you get involved in serious think tanks like Heritage Foundation with a plan to reduce other people’s freedoms, because you don’t like Google search results and expect me to believe you’re worthy of my respect? Why are you the ones whining about politics the most on Twitter? Why are you claiming we Millennials whine the most, when the data proves it is your generation? How are so many of you louder Gen Xers all honestly this stupid? Please tell me, I’d genuinely like to know at this point how you can create think tanks whining like a bunch of worthless, privileged, ignorant dipshits who are genuinely too stupid to understand you’re ruining lives and creating a dystopia based on your pathetic fears while all your worthless fucking generation ever does is rob Millennials of our future and then bitch and moan and whine over and over about how we’re the selfish ones while you demand the destruction of US Constitutional rights because you’re too stupid to understand your fears of social media are laughably pathetic and completely unfounded? How are you “conservative libertarian” Gen Xers and the Heritage foundation genuinely this stupid? Please tell me, I’d like to know what dumbass raised you to be so genuinely fucking dumb so that future generations can avoid being the miserable, worthless eyesores that are your entire miserable trash of a political subgroup; you worthless scum of a political ideology that disgraces our country with your very existence like the rest of your worthless political subgroup. I genuinely cannot think of a single moment in my life where I’ve heard anything remotely intelligent from someone with your political leanings that didn’t immediately turn any intelligent argument your political ideology had into horribly stupid conclusions based on self-serving and narcissistic notions. Your entire political subgroup is a disgrace to our country and our country would be better off if you all had been aborted at birth. Truth hurts and that is why your feelings are hurt; you know deep down that I’m right. What has your political ideology achieved apart from the self-destruction of US power and pointless impediments for US hegemony to influence the world?

Oh, but please, start arguing how much of a bad person I am for being courageous enough to tell you worthless snobs the truth about what you’ve wrought instead of focusing time and energy on any single one of these serious life-threatening issues that brings harm to democratic institutions and the lives of innocent people, especially our fellow Americans like Indigenous service members fighting and dying to protect your ungrateful hides while their families get raped and killed by sex offenders who are usually part of your generation in terms of age-group; while you remain completely unaware and yawn in indifference at how much Indigenous service members and other service members bleed to keep you safe.

Lately, I have found it impossible to put up a clear principle for resisting this degradation of man without recourse to the Christian idea that we are created in God’s image. We may regard the doctrine of the Incarnation—God becoming man—as an assertion of the dignity of man. It is an assertion that could serve to moderate the contempt of the powerful, but let us not count on that. What seems certain is that it is an idea that can only embolden the self-respect of the citizen. If taken to heart and numbers, it might lead a people to insist on reclaiming that status for themselves.

This is literally your generation confessing to having a God complex and seeing yourselves as living embodiments of Jesus Christ himself. I can’t think of a more narcissistic concept that’s pleasurable only to self-entitled dipshits. Reading this conclusion is what finally convinced me. Way to prove that everything I said about your worthless political ideology was valid; this is just embarrassing.